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PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Review

Sebastian Williamson

22 Nov 2012 16:29Last updated: 9 Oct 2015 18:00

Release date23 Nov 2012

DeveloperSuperBot Entertainment

Best get ready to rumble...

★★★★★

All-Star Battle Royale is a strange one. Clearly, its a clone of Nintendos deftly crafted Super Smash Bros, which in itself presents a formula for excellence most publishers would simply struggle to replicate given the star-studded roster of characters Nintendo has to hand.

Enter Sony and its newly formed studio, SuperBot Entertainment, a development house comprised of game designers skilled in crafting titles that hang on digital dust-ups, including former Capcom community guru and Evolution Championship Series founder, Seth Killian. With Killian on board as a lead designer and a sizeable line up of fairly balanced characters from first and third parties including inFamous Cole McGrath, God of Wars Kratos and Bioshocks Big Daddy, Sonys brawler offers the best of both play styles. It can easily be picked up and enjoyed by the casual core with its intuitive base combo systems, but if you take the time to master a characters move set, youll make short work of the button-hammering drones on PlayStation Network. This all sounds great, right? Not quite.

The problem here is the lack of gameplay modes and a rather lacklustre interface. For a game that pops with so many colourful characters and stellar gameplay mechanics, its a little too bland on the surface. Still, it does make up for this with an abundance of customisation options and unlocks, and its also worth noting that if you buy the PS3 edition youre automatically entitled to a download code for the Vita version. Not quite King of the Ring but absolutely worth a look-in.